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Portland Transportation Needs Guidebook

Our streets cover about a fourth of the landmass of Portland. And just about everywhere, Portlanders see our streets falling short of expectations.

In East Portland, families walk in roadside ditches to reach bus stops. In Southwest, walking across a street can be a high-risk game of chicken without flashing beacons to help stop fast-moving traffic. Bikes and 18-wheelers crisscross in North Portland for lack of separated routes.

Even in neighborhoods full of sidewalks and light rail stops, streets are deteriorating for lack of preventive maintenance. If we keep deferring basic upkeep, we’ll inevitably face a higher tab later on: It’s far more expensive to rebuild a street than to repair it.

This is your guide to understanding the size of the transportation problem.

Community activists and PBOT staff have worked together over the years to identify safety needs. Safety needs include sidewalks missing near schools and intersections lacking crosswalk signals. Proposed safety projects have been identified in a variety of plans and project lists. You can view particular plans and projects in these sections on Safe Routes to School, High Crash Corridors, Neighborhood Priorities.

City engineers have looked at every mile of our streets, identifying which ones are ripe for an inexpensive resealing and which need to be completely rebuilt. They looked at busy streets and neighborhood streets.

To bring the city’s transportation assets to good condition, it would cost $1.5 billion. This wouldn't include much-needed safety projects beyond maintenance.

An advisory committee is considering a potential list of projects to be funded with a new transportation revenue source. This is not such a list.

Use the links below to learn more about Portland's maintenance and safety needs.